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Rosie Goldsmith: Lit Link 2017 - Despite Brexit

It’s very easy to be positive about Europe here in Croatia, when the sky and sea are turquoise blue, the sun is hot and bouncing off the white stone walls, and when you are surrounded by superb writers, publishers and editors from the UK and Croatia, excelling through their luminous prose, wit and warmth. The author Robert Perišić and author-publisher Ivan Sršen have been running the Croatian LitLink Roadshow for five years, inviting equal numbers of writers from Croatia and A Guest Country (this year, poor Blighted Britain) to travel together round the country, to debate, walk, eat, drink and hold public readings in unusual venues.

A year after the (disastrous, misguided, heartbreaking) UK Referendum decision on Brexit, it’s time for some good news.

It’s very easy to be positive about Europe here in Croatia, when the sky and sea are turquoise blue, the sun is hot and bouncing off the white stone walls, and when you are surrounded by superb writers, publishers and editors from the UK and Croatia, excelling through their luminous prose, wit and warmth. The author Robert Perišić and author-publisher Ivan Sršen have been running the Croatian LitLink Roadshow for five years, inviting equal numbers of writers from Croatia and A Guest Country (this year, poor Blighted Britain) to travel together round the country, to debate, walk, eat, drink and hold public readings in unusual venues. My favourite, the Planetarium in Rijeka (‘stars on stage, stars in the sky’?).

Was it a provocation or a kindness on Robert’s and Ivan’s part to give this year’s festival the theme ‘Despite Brexit’? I can only report that the Croats weren’t much interested in Brexit and the Brits were delighted to escape the awful reality ‘back home’. After years of civil war and divisive nationalisms in the former Yugoslavia, Croatia is today proud to be an EU Member and simply cannot understand how Britain could contemplate leaving. The success of the three-day-LitLinking of Europeans, sharing our literatures and languages, proves beyond measure that the sun still shines and the stars still twinkle ‘Despite Brexit’.

I was invited to participate in LitLink as a journalist and director of the European Literature Network. But this trip is significant for me for an additional reason: it is my first trip back in Croatia since I was here for the BBC at the end of the Yugoslav Wars, just over twenty years ago...

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